


The Last Men On Earth

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Angst, Developing Relationship, Ghosts, M/M, Mystery, Original Character(s), POV Third Person, Post Apocalypse, Psychological Horror, Sharing Body Heat, Sherlock Being Sherlock, Slash, Supernatural Elements, Suspense, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2013-03-05
Packaged: 2017-11-22 15:39:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 13,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end, when it comes, is peaceful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ticking away the moments

 

 

  
  _and not one will know of the war, not one_  
 _will care at last when it is done_  
 _not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,_  
 _if mankind perished utterly_  
 _and spring herself, when she woke at dawn_  
 _would scarcely know that we were gone._  
–sara teasdale

* * *

“It’s raining again,” said John.

He was right, as it happened. For the whole morning, the sky had been that mottled, depressing sort of grey that heralded a serious storm; the streets were wet and slippery with rain, the clouds overhead swollen with the promise of more. It was only now, though, that it really started to come down in earnest, beating against the windscreen as if the very forces of nature were against them. The accuracy of John's remark didn’t stop it from being ever so slightly inane, and the moment he voiced it he wished it were possible to take it back.

For a moment, Sherlock didn’t respond – only stared ahead at the empty road, pupils contracted in the greyish light. Then he turned to John, fingers tapping on the steering wheel. “How fortunate I am,” he said in dry tones, “in having a travelling companion of such overwhelming wisdom and intelligence.”

“There’s no need to be snarky.”  John shifted slightly, the map crackling on his lap, and glanced out of the window at the green-and-grey landscape rushing past them. “I was just looking for something to say.”

It was true. For the last forty-five minutes, the atmosphere in the car had been saturated with an almost tangible silence, so heavy that John could practically taste it. It wasn't an angry silence, or an awkward one; merely the kind that occurred when two people had entirely run out of things to say. That kind of silence happened a lot between them, and normally John didn’t mind it. Suddenly, though, he desperately wanted it to lift – wanted the reassurance of another voice, another presence, knowledge that he was not the only one left. And yes, it was ridiculous and illogical and Sherlock would probably scoff if John mentioned it, but that was how it was.

“It’s a terrible conversation starter, anyway,” Sherlock said. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why were you looking for something to say? As I see it, it’s not particularly necessary. Not at the moment, at any rate.”

“Well…” John groped futilely for a reason. “To…break the tension?”

For once, Sherlock looked a little confused, which was refreshing. “What tension?” he asked.

John shrugged. “Fair point.”

Clearly giving the conversation up as a lost cause, Sherlock sighed, turned back to the wheel and swerved abruptly as they encountered yet another dead car – an Aston Martin this time, black and shiny and new. John had never really liked black cars (apart from the dependable London cabs, obviously). They always reminded him of hearses.

He shuddered suddenly, realising that this analogy might now be a lot more accurate that it had initially sounded. Encountering other vehicles on the roads was never pleasant – it was eerie, somehow, and never failed to chill him – but at the same time he was glad they were there. It was a reminder, if nothing else, that something _went before_ ; otherwise, he might one day have fallen to believing that he and Sherlock were, and had always been, the only human beings on earth, that nothing had ever been different. Remembering things was important. It would always be important.

The rain got heavier, and the windscreen wipers turned on automatically, lashing back and forth to create a smooth, clear semicircle. Muddy, frothing water sprayed from the car wheels on either side as they roared through a deep puddle.

“Where are we going, then?” John said after a while.

Sherlock sighed again, exasperated. John was quickly eating up his quota of patience for the day, and the quota was never high. Not these days, anyway. “I’ve no idea,” he said. “I thought you knew.”

“I’m not the one driving, am I?” Psychomatic or not, if he kept his foot pressed down on the accelerator for too long, it inevitably started to twinge. As for Sherlock, he never said anything, but John could tell he preferred to have something to distract him, and at least driving was better than just staring out of the window. John was arguably a more competent driver, but the arrangement worked a lot better than taking turns. They were both accustomed to it by now.

“You’ve got the map,” Sherlock points out. “Do you even know where we are?”

“Um…” John opened it hurriedly, and flicked through, scanning the pages. It was incomprehensible to him – a mess of criss-crossing roads, patches of green, cryptic symbols and writing far too tiny to make out. He hazarded a guess. “Wales?”

_“Wales?”_ Sherlock stamped down on the brakes, screeching the car to a halt at the side of the road. John winced at the jarring halt. “How did we get to Wales? We just went past Wiltshire!”

“What? Wiltshire was ages ago. Oh, wait a minute. Sorry, I'm looking at the wrong page. Yeah, we’re not in Wales.”

“Well, where are we, then?”

“Haven’t a clue,” said John.

Sherlock sighed, and placed his head in his hands, patched elbows resting on the steering wheel. Long fingers twined into the dark half-moon curls, as if searching for something, anything to cling on to. The car’s engine growled softly, like a captive beast. “In future,” he said, “do remind me always to rely on your navigating expertise, John.”

Ignoring this, John opened the map fully, squinting at the tangled information that meandered across the page, telling him nothing he didn’t already know. His hand hovered over the sprawl of buildings and fields and roads and rivers (deserted now, all deserted) then his finger came down and stabbed.

“Let’s go there,” he said.

Sherlock stalled the car, finally, then leaned over John’s shoulder and looked. “Where?”

“There.”

Sherlock peers closer, and chokes slightly in disbelief. “The _Golden Sands Holiday Resort?”_

“That’s the one.”

“No,” said Sherlock. That one syllable held resonances beyond finality.

“But – ”

“No.”

Sherlock started the car again, and swerved out into the little country lane, flooring the accelerator. John eyed the speedometer, which was creeping ominously closer towards the hundred-miles-an-hour mark, and opened his mouth to tell Sherlock to slow down because he’d hit somebody. Then he closed it again.

There were no somebodies. All of them were gone. No one was left to hold up umbrellas, to protect their coats from getting splashed by the mud, to wear nice suits and go to work at nine o’clock in the morning. The work was gone, too. The buildings were still there, though. And the vans and cars and lorries. All empty, the tube trains stuck in tunnels like rats that died sudden deaths while still underground. Nobody ever mourns a dead rat rotting in a tunnel. Nobody knows it’s there. Now, there was nobody left to know.

“We _could_ go there,” he said at last, a little lamely, in an attempt to distract himself. “You know. If we wanted.”

“Perhaps, but you’ve overlooked one thing,” Sherlock said.

“What’s that, then?”

“We can’t go there, because we don’t know where it is. And we don’t know where we are, either. Do try and keep up, John.” The car screeched around a hairpin bend, and John closed his eyes to keep back the sudden onslaught of nausea. Behind his closed lids, the darkness spun.

“That's easy,” he said, when he was sufficiently recovered, and confident that he could open his mouth without throwing up. “We just follow the signs to the motorway. All we have to do is get onto the M25, and we’re set.”

“Why?” said Sherlock. “What’s the point?”

He was right, in a way. There was no point. There wasn’t much point to anything, if it came to that – no point in driving, no point in talking, no point in bloody existing at all.

But John refused to think like that.

“I don’t know,” he said, honestly. “But we’ve got to go somewhere. Why not go there?”

So they went there.


	2. that make up a dull day

It was early afternoon by the time they arrived, and the rain was just beginning to cease, giving way to a sun golden and watery as egg yolk. Sherlock stopped the car, and for a moment they just sat there, side by side, staring out at the view.

The sea was huge, and flat, and dull, and all-expansive, and it had no particular colour to speak of; but during that one moment, it was the most beautiful thing John had ever seen. He wanted to wrap himself up in the sight. This was unbelievable. He was waxing lyrical over the seaside. What would it be next, Ode to Joy and paintings of sunflowers?

“There’s a guest house just over that hill,” he told Sherlock, pointing vaguely. “We should head over there before we do anything else. Check that it’s open.”

“Of course it’ll be _open,”_ said Sherlock scornfully.

“Well, we still have to check, don’t we? Come on.”

They hauled themselves out of the car, staggering slightly on legs weak from disuse, and John slung his rucksack over his shoulders. Neither of them had brought much with them – a change of clothes, a toothbrush, a couple of books. No mobile phones, of course. What was the point, when there was nobody left to call? The only part of their past lives that remained with them was the laptop. John wondered about keeping his blog up, if only to stop himself falling into lethargy, but after some thought decided against it. Ironic, he said to himself now; a few years ago there was nothing to write about, and now there was, there was nobody to read it.

Slowly, they made their way up the grassy hillside, the ocean seething miles below them like an endless grey plateau. It was bordered by a neat semicircle of sand, the fresh brassy gold of a newly-minted pound coin and punctuated by the occasional red-and-white striped umbrella. The scene was idyllic, straight out of a picture postcard. The only things missing were the shrieking children, the bikini-clad women sunning themselves and the blotchily tanned holidaymakers frolicking amidst the waves. Some people might have considered their absence an improvement – Sherlock certainly would – but somehow, the beach wasn’t quite beachy enough ( _is that a word?_ John wondered vaguely) without them. It was like watching a film in an empty cinema, surrounded by dusty, abandoned seats. It just didn’t feel _right._

After several minutes, they reached the crest of the hill and arrived at a small village – a hamlet, really, with nothing of import aside from a few small cottages, a restaurant, a fish and chip shop named Crispy Cod, the generic plastic-beach-toys-and-ridiculously-expensive-ice-lollies store, and what was presumably the guesthouse. It was a smallish building; white sandstone, the front door flanked by two short pedestals, on each of which rested a basket of wilting pansies.

John opened the iron gate, which squeaked pathetically, and the two of them (that was him and Sherlock, not him and the gate) went cautiously up the front path. Why they were being cautious, he didn’t know. It seemed like the thing to do.

Once there, Sherlock shoved at the front door with both hands, then jiggled the handle. The door stayed obstinately shut.

“’Of course it’ll be open,’” John mimicked, simply because he couldn’t help himself.

Sherlock glowered at him with such malice that the last unicorn, a litter of puppies, and a small child enjoying its first ice cream cone had all just simultaneously died. “Easily fixed,” he said, and bent down to lift the basket of pansies off the stone pedestal. Then, grunting slightly with the effort, he pulled the pedestal itself free from the ground in which it was embedded. At first it remained where it was; but after a few seconds of tugging, it came loose in a shower of damp earth and Sherlock bore it aloft, angling it with difficulty towards one of the neat lace-curtained windows.

“Er – Sherlock, what’re you doing?” John questioned, with a growing sense of foreboding.

“I’m going to break the window,” Sherlock replied calmly.

“Break the – _are you insane?”_

“That’s one of those rhetorical questions, isn’t it?”

“You’re going to break the _window?”_

“I believe that is what I said,” agreed Sherlock, and proceeded to do so.

John covered his ears instinctively against the sound of the impact, but even that didn’t block the crash that shattered the still afternoon like a gunshot. The glass didn’t immediately explode into dramatic fragments like in the movies; it merely spiderwebbed into an intricate network of cracks, gleaming and impossibly thin, then collapsed in on itself, showering the ground with crystals. The tinkling sound was silvery, like brittle laughter.

“Right,” said Sherlock, dropping the pedestal onto the grassy verge with a thud. “Let’s see what joys the Golden Sands Guesthouse has to offer us.” He pushed out the last pieces of glass still clinging to the frame.

“Sherlock,” said John, in the severest tone he was able to muster, “that is _breaking and entering!”_

“I haven’t entered yet,” Sherlock replied. He climbed up onto the ledge and stood for a moment, wobbling slightly, before ducking his head and disappearing under the window frame. “Oh! Now I have!”

Giving up, John sighed and followed him, with rather less grace. Blinking in the sudden dim light, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, and eventually made out a small living room – very typically Olde English, with hideous flowered wallpaper, peat-coloured sofas and a television roughly the same size as a watermelon.

Light streamed into the room as Sherlock yanked back the curtains, his slender figure silhouetted against the afternoon sun. John set to work on the other windows. Before long, the entire room wa fully illuminated. It was not an improvement.

“Interesting,” Sherlock said.

“What’s interesting?”

His friend turned to him, and John noticed that his pupils were doing that strange flickering thing that happened whenever he was scanning something, analysing it, taking it down. It was good to see it again, John thought. “It seemed this guesthouse is never frequented, even…before,” Sherlock explained, delicately edging around the topic neither of them wanted to discuss. “Difficult to tell, seeing as it’s been abandoned for so long, but it seemed there were only one or two visitors – both of them residents. Hardly surprising the place is so antiquate – anyone who chose to stay here for this length of time would have naturally become rather set in their ways.” He moved swiftly to the low, peeling door. “Who say we investigate the state of the kitchen?”

Neither of them had eaten anything other than a packet of salt and vinegar crisps for the last eight hours, so John was eager to go along with this. He cast a quick glance back over his shoulder towards the dusty living room. As far as he could make out, it was just a living room. Shaking his head, he followed Sherlock out of the door.

The hallway was narrow, the ceiling hung with dusty chandeliers. Once they’d opened all the doors and turned on all the lights – none of which actually worked – they found that the four rooms leading off it consisted of a dining room, another living room (this one more formal, but similarly outdated), a games room and, thank Christ, a kitchen.

John dived in before Sherlock and eagerly pulled open the door of the defunct fridge. Its contents, however, were something of a disappointment. After he had thrown out the meat and the liquid lettuce leaves, and poured the bottles of rancid milk down the sink, the only items he could salvage were a couple of tins of baked beans, some macaroni, and – bizarrely – a bag of Moon’s Marshmallows. The freezer was in a similar state.

“What exactly were you hoping to found?” asked Sherlock dryly, from behind him.

“Food, ideally,” John said. “But there isn’t any. Only to be expected after this long, I suppose. Shall we check out the room situation?” Something inside him, a small rebellious voice, longed to dispose of this small talk; to return to the easy banter they previously indulged in, to dislodge the choking weight of everything they’d left unsaid. But he didn’t quite dare, and he didn’t know what would happen if he did.

They found two rooms (if there’d been a number 221, John wouldn’t have minded going for that, but there wasn’t; in fact, the rooms weren’t even numbered, so they settled for two interconnecting ones on the second floor that were marginally less neglected than the others), and John began to unpack his stuff. It didn’t take long before he was done, and faced with a more immediate problem. Several, in fact.

John rapped his knuckles sharply on the interconnecting door. There was no response, so he opened it anyway and was greeted by the sight of a prone Sherlock sprawled out dramatically across one of the twin beds like some nineteenth-century heroine, eyes closed and face mostly embedded in the pillow. John was pretty sure he wasn’t asleep, but he was also pretty sure that he wouldn’t be moving anytime soon.

The bay window overlooking the beaches was open several inches, rattling in the wind. John tried to close it and failed. It was jammed. He made a mental note to have at it with a hammer later on.

 “I’m going down to the village to see if any of the houses were stocked up,” he told the horizontal figure. “We need to find food, supplies, all the rest of it. Otherwise we’re no better off than we were in London. You coming?”

Sherlock made a vaguely negative sound, although he still did not deign to open his eyes.

“Right, then,” said John, and left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!!!  
> May your limbs grow long and your chocolate never melt.


	3. we fritter and waste the hours

The resort was deserted. Utterly.

Of course it is, John reminded himself; this wasn’t one of those thriller movies where a genetic mutation oozed out of a dustbin to scary music, or a troop of heroic survivors stepped forward armed with AK47’s. At one point, he was convinced that there was someone behind him, and spun round sharply a couple of times in the hope of surprising them, but there was no one there and all he heard was the sound of his own breathing, his own footsteps.

It seemed he was getting paranoid. A bit not good, then.

The cottages were all locked, and John didn’t feel quite right about breaking into them; not that it would be much use, anyway. He filled the carrier bag he brought with everything non-perishable he could find in the restaurant, dried things and tinned things, and in the Crispy Cod, he threw away the mouldering chips and grabbed a few bottles of sauce (the state of the fish was something he did not particularly want to examine). After that, he went into the tourist shop, which was still open and liberally stocked with everything from garish T-shirts to buckets and spades in bright primary colours. There’s a vending machine by the counter, and he had a go at smashing the glass – first with his feet, then his fists, then with a stool, except all that happened was that his hands hurt, and then his feet, and then his arm.

Finally, feeling ridiculous, he fed a pound coin into the slot. To his astonishment, the machine came to life and silently delivered him a packet of prawn cocktail crisps. He managed to get several Twixes, some carbonated drinks and an energy bar out of it before it made a noise like a small electronic burp and ceased to function. It gave him a slightly spooky feeling, as if he’d been communicating with a ghost.

When he got back to the guesthouse, Sherlock still hadn’t moved – at least, not visibly. John deposited his findings on one of the cabinets and stood over him, arms crossed.

“Well. What happens now, then?”

“Don’t ask me,” Sherlock said into the pillow. “You’re the one who wanted to come here.”

John spent the next hour trying to read the newest Ruth Rendell crime novel, but he couldn’t concentrate and before long he closed his mind on the antics of Inspector Wexford and rolled on to his back, staring up at the blank, impassive ceiling above him. _I could really do with a Chinese takeaway just now_ , he thought to himself, right before he slipped into unconsciousness.

* * *

The next morning, Sherlock still refused to get up.

John could see the signs as clearly as if someone had scrawled them across the wall in indelible marker pen: _it’s those black moods again,_ the words said, empty and stark and there was no getting away from them. Back home, it was easy – all you had to do was cover him with a blanket, feed him a steady supply of toast and tea and wait for the amassing dark clouds to clear. Here, it wasn’t so simple. Not only was there no tea (apart from the tiny jar that John managed to retrieve from the kitchen, which tasted of nothing but gave off a peculiar and off-putting smell of unwashed socks), but there were no cases, and therefore no incentives to distract Sherlock and goad him into rising. Just the days stretching endlessly on before them, filled with nothing but emptiness. Life had become a blank calendar, the pages ripped off one by one.

They couldn’t live on pasta and vending machine crap forever. In fact, they couldn’t live on vending machine crap at all, because the machine was no longer responding, and he couldn’t figure out how to get it open. So that day John set out to the thin, gleaming slice of river that cut through the fields and ran down to the ocean, armed with a bucket and a net. The bucket had a smiley face on it. Already, it was a better companion than Sherlock, here at the end of the world. More helpful and definitely a lot more fun.

After walking for a while along a featureless muddy track, he came to the stream, homing in on the sound of bubbling, rushing water. It was shallow and clear, frothed with white and edged by pale, smooth rocks, widening as it neared the sea. The sky overhead was a stormy watercolour. He’d had enough of grey weather, winter weather, and silently asked the clouds to wait until he was finished before they unloaded their burden.

For over two hours straight he sat on a rock at the edge of the river, legs dangling in the freezing current, almost-salty water pulsing beneath his feet. It was bloody stupid, if he was honest. For starters, he had no idea how to go about this. Never been fishing in his life. Didn’t even know if this was the right _place_ for fish. He saw an advertisement in the convenience store, a slip of paper pinned to a cork board, for fishing excursions, and he was pretty sure it was to this location, but by the time his toes have turned blue and numb he’d still caught nothing except a few rocks and a chunk of seaweed. It smelled of salt and rot, a little like the inside of the Crispy Cod.

In a fit of temper, he chucked the net into the grass. Then he started feeling guilty, and fretting about animals getting caught in it, and went to pick it up again. He was a fool to himself, really.

He was just heading up the front path again when he remembered the car. Dropping the net and discouragingly still-empty bucket on the doorstep, he went off down the hill to have a look at it. However, when he tried to start it up, there was nothing but an inexplicable _ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk_ sort of noise, which John had heard before and recognised, in this context, as fatal. However, he refused to give up that easily.

After several minutes of pulling the clutch, depressing the accelerator, kicking the car, shoving the car, beating the car with a tree branch in a homage to “Fawlty Towers”, and finally just swearing at the car, he was finally forced to accept that it had – what do people say nowadays? – “given up the ghost”. He gave the mud-spattered paintwork one last punch, to relieve his feelings.

It made his knuckles bleed. It didn’t make him feel any better.


	4. in an offhand way

“What’ve you been doing all of today, then?”

The question was really more of an attempt to make sure that his friend was still alive than in any expectation of a rational answer. Sherlock did not lift his head, but his reply was just distinct enough  - and acerbic enough – to make out. “Really, John, what does it _look_ like I’ve been doing?”

“In all honesty, not much. Oh, wait – let me guess, you’re going to tell me you’ve been out battling ninjas or shooting Arabian assassins or dancing with the Queen or something. What, is this whole swooning-fair-maiden thing really a cover-up for your daredevil double life? Am I supposed to have got that by the dirt under your nails or a cut made by some special mace only produced in Sharm el Sheikh? Is all this some kind of elaborate questionnaire to test out my observational skills?”

The response was more muffled this time, and John frowned. “Sorry?”

Sherlock freed his mouth from the pillow. “I said, I am in the depths of despair,” he enunciated more clearly. “And sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, John. It doesn’t suit you.”

 _You complete and utter bloody hypocrite,_ John thought, but didn’t say it. “Oh dear. Depths of despair. Really?”

“Well.” Sherlock furrowed his brow, and appeared to reconsider. “Not the _absolute_ depths, perhaps. But you could see them from here. If you squint.”

The breeze from the open window that John never remembered to fix ruffled the drapes, raising goose bumps on his arms.

“Right. Well, I’ll let you get on with that, then.”

John picked up the bucket, making to leave the room. Behind him, he sensed a feeling of fierce invisible struggle, which he only picked up because he knew Sherlock so well (probably better than he knew himself, if it came to that), and he waited by the door for just a little longer than usual, giving him one last chance. The pressure seemed to build inexorably, until Sherlock sighed and spoke again, his voice quieter now, insistent.

“I’m not in the mood to assist with anything right now, John,” he said. “Just give me a few days, and I’ll see what I could manage. Whatever needs doing…”

“There’s only two of us right now,” John insisted, facing him head on. “I need you to lend a hand.”

At that, Sherlock gave him a disdainful glance, slant-eyed and supercilious, like a Siamese cat. “Who said there _had_ to be two of us?”

There was a bit of a silence, then. A lot of a silence, if it came to that. And this time it was definitely not a comfortable one. It hung over them, dark and heavy as a shroud.

John is the first to break it. “So…what were you saying?” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded cold, but there was a devil in him now, and it wouldn’t let him stop talking even though he knew he should. A part of him wondered, distantly, what exactly the devil was trying to say, and why it felt the need to use his lips and tongue and teeth to do it. He carried on anyway. “Is it that you don’t want me holding you back any more? You want to run off and find somewhere where you can be all on your own with your brilliant mind and live off dustbin scraps? Well, if you don’t want to stay here, I can’t force you. You want to leave? Be my guest. Go on.”

Another of those silences. John couldn’t tell whether Sherlock was seriously considering this proposal, or whether he was just shocked that John had dared to challenge him. In this kind of mood, either one was possible.

“Oh, fuck off, John,” Sherlock said at last, the word sounding strangely obscene in the low, public-school voice, and he turned away again.

So John threw the bucket at his head.

“Jesus _Christ!”_

The bucket still contained a couple of inches of river-water, which was unleashed in a muddy torrent. The top half of Sherlock was instantly dripping wet, the stains on his shirt darkening to a soaked, see-through grey. His curls drooped lankly down, one obscuring his right eye entirely like a black comma. The bucket clattered to the floor and lay, defeated, on its side.

“Get the fuck out of bed!” John shouted at him.

Sherlock got the fuck out of bed, and stood there opposite John, his weight on one leg, looking rumpled and malevolent, but mostly just wet. “Aren’t we supposed to be on _holiday?”_ he said, spitting some water out of his mouth.

“What the hell’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Well, I was always led to understand that holidays constitute lie-ins. However, if I was mistaken in this assumption, please do let me know.”

“That doesn’t mean you could just “lie in” day in, day out, and expect me to run around sorting everything out. I can’t indulge every single whim you have, all right? You’re not a child and I’m through with treating you like one. Besides, there’s stuff to _do_ here, you know!”

Sherlock shifted his weight, dragging a hand through his damp hair. It was seven o’clock in the evening –  just gone, in fact – and the evening light sneaking through the crack in the curtains made his face look even more gaunt than usual, illuminating the hollow angles that came from little food and practically no sleep either.

“What ‘stuff’?” he asked, in a voice somehow both delicate and acidic.

And there John was caught. He floundered for a moment, opened his mouth, closed it again. There really wasn’t much to say.

“I rest my case,” Sherlock said, and moved to lie back down. But before he had a chance, John grabbed hold of his wrists and shoved him against the wall, hard.

_“It’s just you and me, Sherlock!”_

They both froze. The words had been buzzing in John’s head for days, like static, unrelenting in their starkness but still no cause for damage. Now that he had said them out loud, though, they seemed to be buzzing around the room like angry hornets, stinging and stinging.

Sherlock didn’t say anything.

“It’s just you and me,” John repeated, more softly this time. “Listen. Don't you get it? _There is nobody else!_ No one's coming. No one will rescue you, no one will look after you. There’s no one to deduce. There are no more serial killers. There are no more experiments. It’s just you and me.”

“John,” said Sherlock, very coldly, “you’re hurting me.”

No. Not cold. Cold didn’t do that justice, and icy or wintry didn’t even come close. Numb, really, would be the best way to describe it. John let go of the wrists. They dropped to his sides and Sherlock rubbed them cautiously, as if he was a prisoner, as if they’d been handcuffed for a long time and the blood flow had begun to cease.

“Listen to me,” John said again.

Sherlock gave him a _look._ (They were famous, Sherlock’s looks, and John usually tended to just crumple beneath the force of their voltage. Not this time, though.) “Why should I?” he snapped.

It was true. There was no reason why anyone should listen to John. Especially not Sherlock, who never listened to anyone at all.

“I don’t know,” he said at last, only because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. There wasn’t anything revelatory, nothing that would help this ridiculous, ugly situation they’d found themselves in; nothing, in short, that would do any good whatsoever. He continued regardless. “But look, you might as well. ‘Cause it’s just us, Sherlock. Just us.”

Again, Sherlock didn’t respond.

A storm of mixed-up emotions, of rage and confusion and helplessness, John picked the bucket up off the floor and walks out through the bathroom, closing – but not quite slamming – the bedroom door behind him.

When he next peered in, a few hours later, Sherlock had returned to his original position, except this time his hands were clasped prayer-like under his chin, a monk deep in contemplation. John spotted the violin case in the corner – the catches were undone, but the case itself was not open, which meant either that Sherlock is playing while he is out, or that he opened the case, looked at the violin, then decided against it. In his current situation, the latter seemed most likely.

John retreated, and lay down on his bed again.

He remembered the hovel of a room he inhabited when he first came to London, remembered the grey walls that seemed to press in on all sides and the lamp that flickered and buzzed like the striplights in a tube carriage. He remembered, most of all, the nothingness. The empty room, the empty screen that he should have been typing his life into day after day but contained only white space and a blinking cursor, and most of all the empty empty empty days stretching on before him like squares in a math textbook, waiting to be filled with numbers and digits and people. He did a lot of staring at the ceiling when he was in that room, too.

 _Circular narrative,_ he thought, although he couldn’t quite recall what it meant.


	5. kicking around on a piece of old ground

On Thursday – at least, he thought it was Thursday, though he was never quite sure of the date any more, and his phone ran out of charge a long while ago – he found the jeep. It was rusting, battered, a hunk of metal skewed at an improbable angle in a field behind one of the cottages. It’d been there so long that the grass and brambles and those long weedy things with the clinging tendrils (John couldn’t remember what they’re called, and he couldn’t remember if he ever did, and he couldn’t remember if he even cared) had begun to grow around it, crawling sinuously up over the bonnet and wrapping themselves around the battered tyres like over-affectionate lovers.

 John had nothing better to do, so he yanked open the car door – which resisted at first, then finally gave way and burst open, trailing weed – and peered inside. The key was still in the lock. There was a strange smell in there, a smell of the dank marsh, or of the earth, or the creeping undergrowth. Of wild and lonely places coming alive at night, when there was nobody around to see. The seats had begun to rot away. He clambered up into the driver’s seat and just sat there for a moment, eyes shut, breathing in the smell.

It was like being buried alive.

He’d be lying if he said he’d had any expectations, or any intuition, or anything at all, really. He knew perfectly well that there wasn’t a logical possibility that the car would be working. So when he reached out and turned the key, just for the hell of it, the sudden growl and shudder took him completely by surprise, and he almost fell out of the car.

Jeeps. He loved jeeps. He had never said a word against jeeps. Clicking the key back to its original position and silencing the engine’s hum, he leaned back against the seat again and exhaled, long and quiet. A woodlouse made its way over the dashboard.

After a few minutes, he exited the car again, stepping down into the knee-length grass. Instinct made him want to to bring the keys with him, but there wasn’t much point, really, so he left them on the seat and covered them with some stuffing, hoping they wouldn’t get stolen by rabbits or anything.

He shoved open the door to Sherlock’s room without bothering to knock. “Hey, listen, didn’t wanted to disturb you but I’ve found something. It – ”

Then he pulls up sharply.

Sherlock was lying flat on the floor, arms crossed on his chest like a parody of a corpse. His face was white and translucent as wax, chiselled-looking, eyes loosely closed. The veins on his eyelids made the skin look as blue as the flame on a Bunsen burner, which was kind of a strange analogy, but that was the first thing that came to mind, and it wasn’t like that mattered anyway, it wasn’t like any of it mattered, because his former flatmate (shit that, his _friend)_ was lying on the floor and he wasn’t moving.

“Sherlock!” He crossed the room in two strides and dropped to his knees, his stomach lurching uncomfortably. “Sherlock, wake up. Seriously, don’t do this to me now. Wake up!”

He was breathing so fast he didn’t even notice those pale eyes flicker open, didn’t see the still  face twitch, until he felt the hand grip on to his sleeve.

“I’m awake, John,” Sherlock said quietly.

The world seemed to shimmer, to stretch. John sank down in an awkward kind of sprawl, and felt himself go a little weak around the edges. The words left his mouth in a blurred rush. “Fuck, don’t do that _ever again._ I thought…” The panic was starting to die down, leaving him feeling slightly ridiculous again.

“I know what you thought.” Sherlock lifted his head, resting it on his hands. “What did you find?”

“It’s a car.” John was still breathing a little faster than normal, but his heart rate was beginning to slow. Thank God for small mercies. “I found a car, and it’s working. We can get out of here when we want to.”

“That’s good,” said Sherlock. And then he didn’t say anything else.

“Well…” John floundered. “Do you want to come and have a look at it?”

“Why would I?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I thought you’d be…curious.”

“I’m all right here, thanks.”

“You haven’t changed out of those pyjamas in six days. And you’re lying on the floor.”

He cracked open one eye. “Yes, we’ve established that. Any other penetrating insights you’d like to voice while we’re at it?”

“You’d prefer a question? OK, _why_ were you lying on the floor?”

“Why not?” Sherlock asked, in his usual way of not quite answering the question, or answering it with another question, or just avoiding it altogether.

“Well, because there’s a bed right next to you?”

Sherlock scoffed, but only, John was certain, because he could think of no decent reply.

“Don’t you wanted to leave? I thought you hated it here.”

“It is the same everywhere,” Sherlock declared morosely, rising unsteadily to his feet at long last. “There is nothing. No one. Not anywhere. Tell me, John, what is the _point?”_

He was sounding uncannily like those emo heavy-metal bands Harry used to listen to in her teens, full of screaming guitars and singers with heavy black eyeliner, and John sighed impatiently. “For God’s sake, Sherlock, just get out of this room for once!”

Sherlock’s voice was just as loud as his own. _“No!”_

 “Oh, why don’t you fucking _do something!”_ John shouted at him.

Sherlock did something. He hit John in the face.

There was a crunching sound like a Range Rover impacting with a hedgehog, and a sensation like brain freeze, if brain freeze was centered on one’s nose. The numbness was so intense that for a few seconds, John didn’t even notice the blood, until it started dripping over his top lip and into his mouth.

“Ow,” said John, not so much because it hurt, but because he felt as if he should.

Sherlock waved his hand abstractedly around, as if he was trying to shake the pain out of it. John’s nose was obviously much harder than he’d expected. “Ow,” he agreed.

Then they looked at each other, face to face, without blinking, for what must have been about thirty seconds. It was one of those moments which would have made a wonderful film shot, but in real life just felt stilted and awkward. They were very close, suddenly. John didn’t know how that had happened. The air felt oddly charged, as though a lightning storm was passing overhead.

John almost spoke, but ended up closing his mouth to trap the words inside. Any speech, he knew almost intrinsically, would break the fragile balance hovering between them. It was strange, but he felt as though the two of them were on a precipice – high up and clinging on for dear life, the slightest misstep threatening to send them into an abyss. They were frozen, paralysed, and anything could happen right now, anything at all. A bomb could go off. Someone could knock at the door. John could hit Sherlock back, harder. Or he could do something else.

Just as the pressure reached tipping point, Sherlock moved backwards suddenly.

“Wait,” he said.

“What?”

“Your nose,” Sherlock said, “is bleeding.”

“I’d noticed.”

Feeling unusually hollow, John went sideways into the bathroom they shared, and tore off a roll of toilet paper. Sherlock followed him in and watched him as he methodically soaked up the blood, finishing off by stuffing two walrus tusks of tissue into his nostrils. When he was done, he turned round and asked (slightly nasally), “What was that for, then?”

“Not sure,” admitted Sherlock. He looked as if he might add something – perhaps a, “Sorry” – but didn’t.

And yes, John was angry, because contrary to popular belief, he did get angry sometimes, just like most other human beings on this damn planet. He was angry, and to be honest he wouldn’t mind punching Sherlock back, but that wouldn’t do much good. Anger never really solved anything. He nodded and said, “Right,” and flushed away the crimson-stained tissues.

“What kind?” Sherlock said abruptly, as John was leaving the room.

“Sorry?”

“What kind of car is it?”

“It’s a Jeep,” John told him. “A blue one.”

“Ah.”

John closed the door behind him.

“That went well,” he said to nobody in particular.


	6. in our hometown

When the next night came, it was cold.

It wasn’t actually Thursday night. It was a few days later than that, but John wasn’t counting the past few because he’d spent them sitting up, hour after hour, in the glow of the candles he  obtained from the breakfast room, powering through the few remaining novels he had brought – and no, he had not been reading Fifty Shades of Grey, no matter what Sherlock might try to insinuate – or tossing and turning, or staring out of the window, or wandering the empty guesthouse like a lonely, shadowy phantom in striped pyjamas. (That was what lack of exercise did to you.) At one point he even got out his laptop, though God knew what he thought he was going to write on it, but as soon as he’d turned it on it had bleeped, showed him the picture of an empty battery and switched itself off again.

Right now, though, the only thing he could do was huddle beneath the bedcovers and clench his teeth to stop them chattering. When he slid out of bed, just to have one last look out of the window, it was as though an iron fist had clenched on his entire body. The lack of central heating had never seemed so cruelly apparent. Spreading one hand on the windowpane, he felt the chill of it seeping through his skin, like ice in his veins. When he took the hand away, it left a pale imprint, like a sort of ghost of itself.

He crawled back into bed and pulled the sheets over his head, clenching his fists tight to try and banish the numbness. He was tired, more tired than he could recall being for a long time, but it was already pretty obvious that sleep was not going to present itself to him tonight. Already, two sweaters were layered over his pyjamas, but it wasn’t making much of a difference.

Somewhere in the dangerous, smoggy, frozen world beyond the sanctuary of the bedclothes, there was a low creaking noise.

At first he ignored it, body too paralysed to investigate, but then he heard the sound of the door scraping across the carpet and sat up suddenly, sheets gathered around his head like a towel turban. He clawed them free of his eyes and made out a dark, distinct shape in the doorway that leads out on to the corridor.

Relieved, he opened his mouth to ask Sherlock what he was doing here, then closed it again as his voice died in his throat. This figure was the wrong shape for Sherlock. It was much thinner and taller, almost spindly, like a shadow thrown out across a wall by a candle flame.

“Sherlock?” he said, softly, but there was no certainty in his voice now. Their rooms were interconnected – there wouldn’t be any point in the detective entering from the hallway, especially considering his low regard for privacy. John knew now that whoever this was, it wasn’t Sherlock.

The figure came closer. John moved back slightly, struggling to make out any features on it, but the gloom was too complete. He let out a slow, forcibly calm exhalation, and saw his breath appear in smoke before him, fogging the air with a misted white cloud. It was coming closer to him now – it? why was he thinking of the shape as an “it”, it was a person, it had got to be a person – and it wasn’t reaching out its hands or hissing or doing anything that monsters did in hammy horror films, it was just walking towards him very slowly and leisurely, and this was nothing supernatural, this was a person, this was a shadow, this was his imagination, this was –

The interconnecting door half-opened, and a warm golden radiance flooded the room.

For a brief, ridiculous moment, John imagined that what was happening was something supernatural after all. That this was Death approaching him, and the glow creeping into the light-starved corners of his bedroom was something angelic, something ethereal, and any moment now would be accompanied by harps and trumpets. Then the door opened all the way, and it was not an angel. It was just Sherlock, maddening, glorious Sherlock, in a dark blue dressing gown with a candle held aloft.

“You’re still awake,” he observed.

John should be surprised – it wasn’t like Sherlock to state the obvious – but his mind was occupied with other things. He stared at the door opening on to the hallway. It was open, but there was nothing beyond it, and the room was empty.

“Check the hallway,” he ordered tensely, the words coming out clipped and harsh. “Check it. Now.”

Sherlock brushed his gaze over John’s face. “Something’s upset you,” he noted in a low voice. “What happened?”

“Never mind what happened,” John said between chattering teeth. “Just look. Please. For my sake.”

Giving him an expression halfway between sceptical and worried – or at least, what passed for worried where Sherlock was concerned – he stepped out into the dark hallway, holding the flickering candle first to the left, then to the right.

“Nothing,” he called from outside. “There’s nothing here. Is that how it should be?”

“I don’t know.” John let out a bizarre little half-laugh, distorted by cold and confusion and yes, all right, _fear._ Damn it _._ “I honestly don’t know.”

Sherlock came back into the room, slamming the door shut. “You saw something,” he said, flatly. It wasn’t a question. “Or someone.”

John shook his head. “I don’t know what I saw.”

“Yes, but you did see something. Whether or not you could identify the evidence of your eyes and coherently articulate it is irrelevant. Describe it to me. Exactly as you saw it.”

“I can’t. I mean. It – it wasn’t really anything.”

Sherlock sighed impatiently, in a way that suggested they’d been through this many times before, and placed the candle down on the bedside table with a clunk. “So you saw something, but it wasn’t really anything. Crystal clear as ever, John. Thank you for that account.”

“Yes, all right, I’ll tell you. Give me a chance!”

Sherlock waited, and after a moment, John decided he had gathered himself enough to sound reasonably lucid. “It was a person,” he said. “At first I thought it was you, but it was taller. And it didn’t say anything. Just opened the door and came in, walked towards me. Slowly.”

“You’re sure this really happened?”

John glares at him. “It wasn’t a nightmare, if that’s what you mean.” He had nightmares, of course – didn’t everybody? – but not ones like that. His nightmares were of guns and soldiers, of blood and burning suns and parched desert earth, and after they met Moriarty, of drowning. Drowning in deep, dark, icy water, that stole his breath when he tried to call out Sherlock’s name.

“All right, so, not a nightmare. Go on. What did it look like?”

John complied, not just because he wanted the whole thing out there as a kind of proof that he wasn’t mad, but because he could tell that Sherlock was _loving_ this. It was the first time he’d had a chance to think properly in weeks, the closest thing he’d had to a case, and John could practically hear the cogs and the engines beginning to whirr.

“It didn’t really look like anything,” he admitted. Seeing Sherlock open his mouth, he held up a finger in warning. “Wait. Hear me out. It was dark, I couldn’t see the face properly. Just the silhouette. Anyway, so it came in, it was standing over me, and then just as it was about to – shit, I don’t even know what it was about to do – you came in. And then it was gone. I mean, it left.”

“It,” Sherlock said. _“It._ Why do you keep saying ‘it’?”

“What else am I supposed to say?”

“The first thing you said was that it was a person. If it was a person, if it had had features and clothes and all the rest of it, you’d have said he or she, more likely he. But you couldn’tsay what it looked like, you haven’t even stated that it appeared human, and you’re using the word “it” that indicates you don’t think it was. You just said “person” so I wouldn’t dismiss your story out of hand due to my solid and unwavering cynicism regarding the supernatural. You also initially said, “it was gone” rather than “it left”, implying that your first impression was that it had simply vanished upon my arrival rather than departing the room in the normal way, although you immediately tried to convince yourself that your mind was playing tricks on you, hence your insistence that I check the hallway. Not to mention the fact that I myself didn’t see anything when I came in, and yet your emotional state is all too apparent.”

John waited for a couple of seconds, to make sure he was quite finished, then nodded. “You’re right. I don’t know what it was, but I don’t think it was human. Because there aren’t any humans left, apart from us, and there was something – I don’t know. About the way it moved. No, that wasn’t it…” He frowned, trying to remember, but already the image was beginning to fragment.

“You’re forgetting already, weren’t you?” Sherlock said.

“I’m not. I’m not. Listen, Sherlock, it wasn’t a dream, all right? I don’t just think stuff up like that, I’m not that imaginative. I was awake when you came into the room – I remember you opening the door! How could I have been awake and asleep at the same time?”

“At Baskerville,” Sherlock said, his words carefully measured and cautious, “in the lab. Remember how you thought you saw that dog – ”

“I didn’t see it. I heard it, and that was only because you were using a microphone to project the sound of a dog into the room!” John couldn’t siphon away the layer of bitterness infusing his words. He’d never quite forgiven Sherlock for that.

“You were still afraid.”

“Of course I bloody was! You made me think I was trapped in a locked room with an enormous, bloodthirsty, genetically mutated monster in there with me. What was I supposed to do? Besides, you thought you saw it too.”

“I was drugged. There’s a difference. I think that just now, you were cold, and it was dark, and you were afraid, and it was perfectly understandable – ”

“Sherlock, _I know what I saw.”_

Sherlock paused for a moment, pressing his lips together tightly. John wound his fingers into the sheets, twisted them around his hands, cutting off what little there was left of his circulation.

“Why did you come in here?” John said softly, at long last.

“My window was broken.”

John remembers the open window, and wanted to punch himself for not fixing it, except that Sherlock had already dealt with that himself quite firmly, thank you. (It still hurt when he sneezed.) If it was cold in this room, he couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must be like in Sherlock’s. If the man wasn’t so bloody stubborn, he would have come here earlier, but he was, and so he didn’t. John imagined walking in the next morning and finding him frozen to the floor, face blue-tinged like a Titanic victim, and shuddered involuntarily.

“John,” Sherlock said, breaking into his thoughts, “you must understand…it’s not that I disbelieve you. I believe that you saw, or thought you saw, something. Maybe it was a shadow, or a projection from the window. Maybe it was your subconscious, I don’t know. But it wasn’t a monster.” Sherlock lifted his gaze to meet John’s, his eyes full of calm surety. “Real monsters don’t exist, apart from the ones in our minds. Things like that don’t happen. Not in real life.”

“What happened to everyone else, then?” John flashed back. “Where did they went? Because you know, they didn’t just get wiped out by some biological weapon, Sherlock. They weren’t massacred in the Third World War. They weren’t swallowed by a tsunami. They just…” He searched for the right wording. “They just weren’t here any more,” he finished, voice slightly weak around the lump forming in his throat.

And for the second time, he had broken the law. The unwritten, unspoken law that hung between the two of them constantly, an upraised and flaming sword. First rule of the end of the world: you don’t talk about people. Second rule of the end of the world: you don’t talk about people. Because in the end, there really was nothing left for them here, and silence was the only value they had in this darkened, damaged world of ghosts.

In the quiet that followed, he could hear Sherlock’s teeth chattering.


	7. waiting for someone or something

“Shit,” John said. He forced his shaky legs out of bed and wobbled to his feet, stumbling like a newborn giraffe. _“Shit,_ you’re just wearing pyjamas, you must be absolutely freezing, I’m sorry, I didn’t think – ”

“I’m fine,” Sherlock said curtly. There was an appropriately cool look in his eye that said _Go no further with this. All I will do is glare at you._ However,John took no notice of it. He had seen it before, and he knew how to beat it down.

“Get in that bed,” he told him, not even caring how it might sound. “Now. Doctor’s orders.”

“And what about your good self, Doctor?”

John puffed himself up, in a way that he hoped looked brave and self-sacrificing. “I’ll take the floor.” _Think manly thoughts, think manly thoughts…_

“Don’t be ridiculous, that way you’ll freeze to death as well. You must see it’s a completely illogical arrangement.”

“It’s sacrifice that I’m prepared to make. Besides, you’re skinnier, logic stands you’ll get cold faster.”

Sherlock folded his arms, leaning against the cupboard. “I am not _skinny,”_ he argued, looking wounded.

“Yeah, you are.”

“It was sinew.”

“If you say.” John had a sudden brainwave. “Want to borrow one of my jumpers?”

Sherlock snorted. “I’m not that desperate.”

John picked up the pillow and hurled it at him. It was a satisfyingly direct hit to the chest.

“Hmm, domestic violence,” said Sherlock, having inspected the cushion for clues. “I underestimated you, clearly.”

“Clearly. Get under the covers.”

“No.”

“Do it.”

An eyebrow raise. “Make me.”

Despite his resolution not to read into their interactions the way he would with other people – after all, it was not like either of them would work together, what with John being pretty strongly heterosexual and Sherlock being, well, _Sherlock –_ the connotations of those last two words would have set him to flushing, if it hadn’t been so bloody _cold._ He considered how to solve the dilemma of trying to coax his stubborn friend under the covers to stop him from freezing to death, and eventually surfaced with a solution. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d have to do.

“Both of us,” he said.

Sherlock looked confused. The expression was wrong for his face; it looked as though it was been grafted on, someone else’s expression occupying the normally detached, superior visage. It was a refreshing sight. “What?”

“Both of us,” John repeated. “All the guides to hypothermia say to share body heat. It’s the only thing that really works, apparently. And besides, it’s ridiculous letting one of us occupy the floor when the bed’s big enough for two.” He steered a confused Sherlock over to the bed by the shoulders and pushed him down on to it, not forcefully, but insistently.

“This is not going to work,” said Sherlock.

John went round to the other side of the bed and flopped down next to him. “Oh, just shut up and lie down,” he told him, shutting his eyes.

“I’ve noted that you become inordinately aggressive when concerned for my welfare,” Sherlock observed uncomfortably, as John pulled the covers up to his chest. “It can’t be healthy.”

“Yeah, well. You’re my best mate, I’m not about to sit back and watch the frost form on your skin.” One of Sherlock’s feet brushed against his calf, and he almost shrieked. _“Je_ -sus! What the hell was that?”

“It was a foot.”

“That was no foot. No living organism is that cold. It must be, I don’t know, maybe an escaped penguin that’s decided to crawl in with us or something like that. An animated icicle. A zombified limb.”

“You’re being utterly ridiculous,” Sherlock said with a sigh, and huddled down, one arm over his face, the other flung out over the pillow. “Go to sleep.”

“All right,” agreed John complacently. “By the way, do you snore?”

“Never having heard myself sleeping, I can’t say. And that’s my arm, John, not a pillow. Just so you know.”

 “Works just as well for neck support.”

John wondered if it was possible for an eye-roll to be audible.

For a long while, they didn’t speak at all. The bed, which was initially the equivalent temperature to the inside of a freezer, was beginning to thaw from their combined body heat, and the sheets encased them like sinking into a hot bath, or sitting in front of a blazing fire. John remembered, in the back of his mind, a long-ago Christmas, when it actually snowed (something he thought only happened in cards and stories) and they’d had a fire going in the grate, and right then it had seemed like the most exciting thing in the world. He’d run out into the snow in pyjamas and bare feet, just to watch the damp blue smoke curl upwards into the sky, standing wide-eyed and surrounded by white flakes, like some soft-focus Disney child. Later on, they’d all sat and watched ancient films and felt the firelight dance across their faces. John figured it probably wasn’t like that, not like he remembered it. Harry would’ve grumbled and moaned and said that the films were cheesy and unrealistic – which, in fact, they were – and his mother would have fussed and fretted and his father would have wanted to watch the sports, because that was how things were in real life. Dimly, John thought that it was kind of a pity that memories never seemed to live up to the real thing. Must be one of those laws of nature.

“Is this normal?” John asked finally. The shivers had abated at last, and weariness was beginning to set in, stealing through his limbs and weighing him down. His mind was beginning to slow, too; the processes slid together, individual thoughts entangling until there was just a collage of words and shapes and images. At first he didn’t realise he had spoken aloud, and then he heard his own voice in the darkened room and felt obliged to elaborate. “I mean, are _we_ normal? Do normal friends do this sort of thing?”

“John,” said Sherlock, his voice low and muzzy with sleep, but for once, not irritated, “since when has anything about us _ever_ been normal?”

Fair point, thought John, and he almost said it, but the thought slipped away from him. Like a tree losing its leaves one by one, he’d forgotten even the thing he was thinking.

Then there was just quiet and the wind outside and soft, rhythmic breaths, and the two of them lay curled together, blankets drawn tightly over them, waiting for the dawn.


	8. to show us the way

John woke to the sound of crashing water.

The sound invaded his senses, permeating his ears insistently and relentlessly, but it was a while before he connected the static-like hiss to the world outside his half-awake dreams. Sitting up carefully, he cricked his neck, stretched his cramped arms, and looked around. The room was bathed in daylight, turned a cold blue through the window’s frost, and the other side of the bed was empty.

Having located the sound of the water – it was issuing, as he would have expected, from behind the bathroom door, and was presumably the shower, unless there’d been a terrible leak in the middle of the night – he slipped on a pair of trainers and went out into the hallway, closing the bedroom door behind him. It was eerily quiet. There were no footprints on the carpet, and the ugly wallpaper print, peeling away in some places and stained yellow in others, offered him no questions and no answers.

They found the front door keys not long after they arrived here, and took care to lock the door every night; and John boarded up the shattered window in the living room days ago, to stop animals and insects and rain from entering the house. The door was still locked. The window was still boarded. He walked around each of the downstairs rooms one by one, but each was deserted. There was no sign of any break-in.

Once he was dressed and washed, he knocked on Sherlock’s door, half-expecting him not to reply. However, a few seconds after the knock, there was a call out for him to come in, and he entered to see Sherlock towelling off, still half-clothed and shivering slightly. John felt himself shudder in sympathy; the chill of last night still lingered, although it was considerably more bearable than it had been at 3am in the morning.

“Well, nothing’s been damaged,” John said. He leans against the doorframe, arms folded. “Door’s locked, just like it was when we arrived. No sign of a break-in. What does that leave us with?”

Sherlock was pulling on his shirt, his back to John. “It leaves us with options,” he said, without turning round. “Four of them, if my assumptions are correct.”

“OK. Hit me with it.”

“Please don’t ever use that phrase in my presence again, John.”

“Right. Sorry.” He moved further into the room, seated himself on the edge of the bed. “What are you thinking at the moment, then?”

“Option number one,” Sherlock said, facing him at last, “is that you imagined it all. Dreamt it. Fantasized it. Hallucinations and mental confusion, however you might try to deny it, are a medically proven result of hypothermia, although I wouldn’t have thought yours was far advanced enough for that. If I was a psychiatrist, I’d say it was some kind of projection, a subconscious fear taking on a physical form…”

“Oh, stop that. You’re starting to sound like Ella.”

Sherlock sat down next to him, looking something between curious and disapproving. “Girlfriend?”

“Nope. My therapist, remember?”

“Ah, yes.” Sherlock nodded in comprehension. “The one whose notes you tried to read upside-down. Can’t think why – it isn’t as though she ever wrote anything of particular importance. Why do you care what she thought anyway?”

“Let’s get back to our nighttime visitor,” John suggesteds. “Oh, and I didn’t dream it, by the way. Do you seriously think I did?”

“Well, I’m listing this in order of probability. And yes, at at the moment, that was the most logical option. You see, unless the intruder in question was exceptionally mistrustful or even malevolent, he would have tried to approach other humans for survival and company. Nobody wants to think that they’re the only one. The fact that he has not come into contact before now suggests that his image was something that your own mind had conjured up, either as reassurance or as a result of fear. But you know what I’ve always said – when you’ve eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains –”

“ – however improbable, must be the truth. Yeah, I know,” John interrupted. “Keep going. What were the other options?”

“Option number two is that he was in the house already. Either he was here when we arrived, or he followed us in before you had a chance to board up the window. Likelihood is that he was hiding in one of the other hotel rooms, but that’s illogical – how would he get sustenance, unless he stole it from our supplies? But he couldn’t have done, we’d have noticed if he had. Or _I_ would, anyway.” John opened his mouth to protest, but Sherlock waves him down. “If this theory’s correct, either he has a secret hoard somewhere or he’s very, very hungry, which would certainly explain why he entered your bedroom – he might have been looking for something. Though if he’s been here that long, he would have known that the food’s kept in the kitchen and in _my_ room, not yours. So he’s either exceptionally stupid, hardly a common phenomenon in my experience, or he’s arrived recently. In the course of things, possible, probable even, but still unlikely. The evidence is shaky as well, there are no visible signs of any other human beings in this area, aside from ourselves.”

The slight stress Sherlock put on “human” made John ever so slightly uncomfortable.

“Third option?” he asked, trying to keep his voice under control.

“Again, this one’s flawed, but the intruder could have entered another way. Are there any secret entrances I don’t know about?”

“If there are, I haven’t seen any.”

Sherlock frowned. “All right. I suppose we can rule that one out. I’ll have a look round later, see if there’s anything you missed.” For a moment he remained still, staring into space, then with a movement so abrupt it made John flinch, he jumped to his feet and strode over to the other side of the room. After taking his coat from the back of the door and  pulling it on, he turned to John. “Where’s my scarf?”

“I didn’t think you brought it,” John answered, slightly befuddled.

“No, you’re right, I didn’t. Damn. Have to do without it for once.” He buttoned the coat and stepped out onto the landing. “Are you coming or not?”

“Coming where?”

“To check out this jeep of yours, of course. Or was that another figment of your imagination?”

John ignored the jibe, hurrying after him. “Wait! Sherlock!”

“What?” Sherlock snapped.

John caught him up at the top of the stairs. “You never told me the fourth option.”

A raised eyebrow. “So I didn’t.”

“Well…what was it, then?”

“Forget about the fourth option,” Sherlock said as they started to descend. “There is no fourth option. It seems I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“Not thinking clearly?” John laughed in disbelief. “You? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Sherlock produced the front door keys from the pocket of his coat and unlocked the door. A gust of icy wind spiralled in through the gap, making the curling envelopes that they hadn’t bothered to throw out yet slip from the hall table, skittering across the floor like fallen leaves. The doorstep was slippery with frost. “We haven’t even asked ourselves the most important question,” he said. “Yes, we’ve discussed how he managed to get in, and what he might have wanted, but let’s be frank with each other – that’s the least of the problem, isn’t it?”

“Let’s not get to that just yet.” John pulled his cardigan down further, pressing his lips together. “My mind’s been fucked with enough as it is.”

Sherlock nodded, slowly, without really looking at him, and John was held by his eyes, wolf-grey in this early light.

* * *

When they reached the jeep, the first thing Sherlock did was fling open the driver’s door and scramble in, running his hands over the dashboard. “Fantastic,” he said. “This, _this_ isa real found. Any idea how much petrol it’s got in it? How long it’ll run for?”

“Haven’t a clue, sorry. So long as we can get it out of the field, we should be OK.” John followed him up, seating himself on the other side of the car, keeping his feet up off the floor for fear of what might crawl over them.

“I’d better just give it a test run.” Sherlock ran an eye over the interior, and pulled a face. “There’s no key. John, don’t tell me you’ve left the key behind.”

“What? It should be here. Oh, hang on, I’m sitting on it.”

Sherlock gave John a slightly contemptuous look as he stood awkwardly, feeling around on the passenger seat. He sifted through mould, stuffing, bits of lint and grass, and finally shook his head. “It’s not here.”

“What did you do with it? Think, John! If you’ve lost the key all this was for nothing. Did you put it in your pocket? Hide it somewhere?”

“I left it on the seat,” John said. He shook his head again, confused. “It should still be here. But it’s not.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Sherlock leaned over. “Let me look. I bet I’ll find it.”

Just as he was leaning over to check, he made a noise. It was a noise that sounded like it was trying to be a warning, and which may have started out life as a gasp, but was intercepted halfway through and choked into deathly silence. John started to ask if he was all right, but then there was a coldness on the back of his neck, a numbness, the prick of steel.

He froze, and a voice in his ear said, very coldly and quietly, “Please stay still. If you make any sudden movements, I shall not hesitate to kill you.” The sharpness dug deeper, sparking a fuse of pain at the nape of his neck. “Nod if you understand me.”

He nodded.


	9. tired of lying in the sunshine

_nine_

* * *

“Get out of the car,” the voice said.

It was clear, high-pitched, a woman’s voice or a boy’s. John obeyed, and Sherlock, after a moment’s hesitation, copied him. The door slammed behind him, and as he spun around he saw the owner of the voice slides out of the car to face them. It took him a minute to make sense of what he was seeing.

Their adversary was no more than a child – seven or eight years old, at a guess. Stockily built, heavyset even, the combination of the full-lipped, pre-pubescent face battling for precedence with the close-cropped cornrows of hair, the man’s woollen sweater worn past the knees, and the foot-long kitchen knife held tightly in both hands.

“It's all right,” he said, keeping his voice low and calm. It was his doctor-voice – the tone he reserved for angry and hysterical patients who refuse to listen to reason, or small children afraid of injections. “We’re not going to hurt you. What’s your name?”

The child – and it was a girl, he could tell that now, the hair and build had thrown him off – didn’t move or speak. Her face was set like concrete, and she held the knife inexpertly, hefting it more like a shield than something she intended to attack with. It should have been comical, but John didn’t doubt that she'd do damage with it if she needed to.

“Listen, how old are you? Are you on your own?” he asked her, gently.

She opened her mouth, closed it again, and finally shook her head. “No,” she decided. “My dad’s back at our house.”

Sherlock looked as if he was about to say something, but John quickly put his finger to his lips and mouthed _stay out of this._ He turned back to the girl, trying to keep the incredulity from his face. “Really? Which house is it?”

She adjusted the knife, keeping her eyes on him. “I’m not telling you that.”

John frowned. “Why not?”

“I’m not allowed.”

He took a step towards the girl, and she pointed the knife directly at him, bracing herself like an athlete. Her teeth were tightly gritted, making the line of her jaw look like a fighter’s. “Don’t come any closer! I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”

John stopped. It was only then that he realised where she had got all her strange threats from – they were quotes, probably lines from crime shows she had watched, books she had read. _Don’t make any sudden movements. I will not hesitate to kill you. I’ll hurt you if I have to._ Those words shouldn’t be coming out of a child’s mouth. Maybe it was a speech, he thought; long practised and rehearsed beforehand in the event of this kind of situation. The last defense against the indefensible, the unknowable. “How old are you?” he repeated.

“She’s eight years old, I believe,” Sherlock said from behind him.

John turned and glared at him. “I wasn’t asking you.”

“Well, you know now, don’t you?”

 “How did you even – ” He cut himself off. “Never mind. So, um – what’s your name?” he asked the girl.

Her eyes were still wary and narrowed with mistrust, her knuckles white on the knife’s cheap plastic handle. “Kelly.”

“Kelly. Right. So Kelly, how long have you been here?”

“Ages and ages. I saw you arrive,” she added, suspiciously. She scuffed a battered tennis shoe against the muddy ground. “You broke into the hotel. That’s not allowed, either.”

“We wouldn’t have had anywhere to sleep, otherwise. It was cold last night, isn’t it? We couldn’t have slept outside in that, could we?”

“Yeah,” Kelly agreed. “It was pretty cold. It froze up my window. But you still shouldn’t have broken in.”

Sherlock stepped forward to stand next to John, and his gaze swept over the little girl; she shifted uncomfortably, eyes darting left and right, unsure where to look. “Kelly,” he said finally, “would you mind coming back to the hotel with us so we could ask you a few questions?”

John reflected that this sentence couldn’t possibly have sounded more suspicious if it had tried. Not for the first time, Sherlock sounded like a combination of a telephone salesman, a police inspector and a paedophile. The coat didn’t help. He could hardly blame Kelly for taking a step backwards. “I’m not supposed to go with strange men,” she said.

“Sherlock, she doesn’t have to come with us,” John hissed in an attempt to defuse the situation.

“Oh, she does,” Sherlock returned quietly. “The question is whether she _will.”_

John closed his eyes for a second, mind racing. When he opened them, a plan had begun to form, fragile as a soap bubble and just as easily burst. “Listen, Kelly,” he started. “How about you just walk with us back to the guesthouse? You can leave whenever you like. You don’t have to come into the hotel. We just want to make sure you’re all right.”

She stared.

“What’s it like?” John asked, very softly. “Being here, with nobody else, just you and your father? Is it strange, not seeing people on the beach or at the shops?”

Kelly’s eyes looked as if they were shimmering, but perhaps that was only a trick of the light. “Lonely,” she said eventually. “Sometimes it’s nice. Nobody annoys me, and I don’t have to go to school or anything. But mostly it's lonely.” Her whole body was tense, rigid as a wire, sharp teeth worrying at her lower lip, and much against his better judgment, John found himself moving forwards to lay a calming hand on her arm.

The reaction was immediate, and perhaps predictable, if he’d thought about it a little more carefully. _“Stay away!”_ Kelly shrieked at him, and lashed out like a captive animal, caged but still vicious, still able to bite.

For a moment he thought she'd missed. Then he felt the jagged pain in his right arm, like teeth closing on his flesh, and the sudden wet warmth of blood. He couldn’t hold back the hiss of pain that escaped his lips.

“Let me see,” said Sherlock immediately, and before John could protest his arm was grabbed and held to the light. Ripped fabric fluttered over a long cut, just wide enough to have been made by a blunt kitchen knife, and he could see the meat of his own flesh beneath the skin.

“I didn’t mean to,” he heard Kelly say, and looked up. The words were strong rather than shaky, and her face remained defiant, but when she blinked two trails of liquid spilled over and ran down her cheeks. She swiped at them furiously, like a mother reprimanding disobedient children.

John sighed. “It’s OK,” he said to her. “I’m not angry. You don’t have to cry.”

“I’m  not _crying,”_ said Kelly with a shrivelling dose of contempt.

Sherlock mopped the blood with the sleeve of his coat, and knots the torn sleeve around the cut, staunching it. When he was tied it off, he looked at Kelly with a glance that was cool and appraising, but not unkind.

“We’re not making you do anything or go anywhere,” he said. “You could follow us or you could stay here. It was your choice. If you’re looking for a personal opinion, I’d highly recommend your accompanying us, but that’s mostly a self-seeking thing.”

“We have marshmallows,” John adds hopefully, adjusting his makeshift bandage.

She thought for a second, eyes flickering. “All right,” she said finally. “But I’m keeping the knife.”

John almost smiled, then. “Sure,” he said.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was a late morning sometime in October and the sky was grey, the air was grey. There was a smell to it, not a strong smell particularly, but it was there and it was dark and just a little bit dangerous, and John could feel it all round him. It wrapped him up in its dampness as he walked along the footpath, swinging a bit of stick at the wild mass of brambles that grew there, blackberries souring and smelling like mince pies, a Christmas dream gone rotten. When he whacked at them they fell to the ground, dark and sticky as the mud under his feet.

Sherlock was talking to Kelly, and yes, normally that would be inadvisable, but he seemed to be coping OK, and she wasn’t running and screaming for someone to help her, which has to be a positive, right? She still hasn’t put the knife down, but she was not pointing it at them anymore. Now it just dangles by her side, a strip of cool fish-gleaming steel, a cooking utensil now and not a weapon – although blood, _his_ blood, was still smeared like crushed red fruit upon the blade.

“Do you know what happened to everyone else in the village?” he said. His voice was deeper than usual, quieter, like the sound of a bow drawn across the lowest violin string. John couldn’t remember which one’s lowest – D, he thought, maybe G, he didn’t know, it didn’t matter. He missed Sherlock’s violin playing.

“I don’t know,” Kelly answered, eyes downcast. “They left. I guess they left.”

“But your father stayed.”

“He was back at our house,” she said, an edge of defiance creeping into her voice. The words had a mulish, defensive intonation. John expected Sherlock to press further, but he didn’t. Which was odd. He had picked up on the tone, John could see by his face, but he was choosing to drop the subject.

“Do you like living here?” he asked.

“Yeah. It was nice. Pretty.” She thought for a moment, brow furrowed. “’Cause everyone’s friends, and they know everyone else. And no one ever locks their doors, even.”

“Except if they live in the guesthouse, clearly,” Sherlock added, a little sarcastically. Kelly just shrugged.

John dropped the stick, dusting off his hands, and thought of alley-cat screeches at four in the morning, the strings of a precious instrument tormented into producing a shrill and agonised wail, so painful to hear that you’d barely believe melody could ever have hidden itself beneath that sound, and he wonders how it was even possible to miss something like that. Then he thought of the time when he first heard Sherlock play it properly, horsehair caressing honey-coloured curves like fingers tracing across the skin of a loved one, the lowest sounds reverberating cathedral echoes and the virtuoso darting effortlessly through the octaves, and decided that he didn’t mind the early morning recitals so much after all.

Why was he thinking about this now?

“Well, here we were,” Sherlock said, as they arrived at the gates. “You’ll be going now, I imagine.” He lifted his chin, glanced down at her with splintered eyes. One elbow was braced against the metal of the gate.

For a time, Kelly hesitated, glancing to the gate and to the fields and back again as if she was watching a tennis tournament, clearly debating her options. On the one hand, there was home: the mysterious “father” they had yet to meet, the rows of empty houses, the abandoned beaches and dew-frosted grass. On the other, there were the two strange men who were inviting her into their abode with no reason other than wanting her to answer their questions. It was not exactly a trustworthy image, and John knew which option a sensible child would choose. Kelly, however, clearly wasn’t a sensible child.

“Fine,” she said at last, and kicked open the gate with a pointed toe. “I’ll come in. But only for five minutes.”

It was only a small thing, but somehow, it felt like a victory.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: If I owned Sherlock, I'd have enough money to buy that velvet top hat I've had my eye on for the past few weeks. I also don't own Pink Floyd, who provided the chapter titles for this.  
> This story will be slash in later chapters. I hope y'all enjoy. Comments are loved and welcomed!


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